“Pshaw!” said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before the light. “I’d go on and pay no more attention to her. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s all imagination!” It was Eliza’s rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own, were “all imagination.”
“Hel-en!”
“All right! I’m coming!” the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible.
It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called “the ancient Jester”—had turned his frown upon their fortunes.
It began to rain—rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.
There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.
The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anticlimactic honeymoon.
“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.
Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.
Eugene did not want to go to the State University.
For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, “top things off” with a year or two at Oxford.
“Then,” said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, “then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he’s really ‘cultsherd.’ After that, of course,” he continued with a spacious carelessness, “he may travel for a year or so.”
But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.
“You’re too young, boy,” said Margaret Leonard. “Can’t you persuade your father to wait another year? You’re only a child in years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world.” Her eyes darkened as she talked.
Gant would not be persuaded.
“He’s old enough,” he said. “When I was his age I had been earning my living for years. I’m getting old. I won’t be here much longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die.”
He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels—in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and farseeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.
“He’s ready to go,” said Gant, “and he’s going to the State University, and nowhere else. He’ll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life.” He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach. “There are very few boys who have had your chance,” said he, “and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you’ll live to see the day when you’ll thank me for sending you there. Now, I’ve given you my last word: you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.”
Part III
XXVIII
Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him exhausted. He tired very quickly.
He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He
